16 care what happens here as long as it doesn't make any noise." There had occasionally been noise in that house. Noise when some tenant's guests went stumbling, shouting, down the stairs in the night and Mrs Kelsey would open her own door and scream at them to shut their mouths. A rumpus and a roar in the mornings, when delivery boys rang wrong bells. "And none of your lip, either ." Yes, this grande dame, pausing to appreciate the cerulean of the sea, could talk down youths trained in the banter of Third Avenue. I CEBOX pans and plumbing fixtures with their insistencies, the memory of them came back to me now on the Côte d' Azur, and other memories of Mrs. Kelsey's "house of tone." There had been the little dilemma of the brazen wench who had somehow got into Mrs. Kelsey's front basement, <ØÆ': ,:-øØ""'o,:û,,: :<.,,r. ., m --/:;> "<' daffy with a gaudy theatrical gauze, for instance, was soon called to ac- count. Once a South .Lt\merican dared to sit overlooking the street in his shirt- sleeves, a sight for all passersby. From the tirade his informality aroused, I should adjudge that he left the city, indeed the country, fleeing to shelter in a less sensitized Argentine. That the ouse did have style I had recognized afresh every spring, when, under the conventional impetus of that season in N ew York, I would decide to move. I must find something cheap- er, for in the matter of finance Mrs. Kelsey was always, to put it mildly, sensible. Then I would consort with the real-estate people, and prowl up dusty stairs and peer into grimy build- ings blotched with a rash of vacancy signs, and examine, too, the boxlike rooms of the new apartment houses, always returning at last to Mrs. Kel- sey's. I would be guilty with my extravagance and haunted with the no- tion that there was a bargain just around the corner, yet in the end I would be beguiled by the high and airy rooms of this house, its good old marble man tels, its carved cornices, its heavy walls and wood- work built in the sound and lavish wholesomeness of the eighties. I don't think I was grate- ful enough to Mrs. Kelsey's own part in the style of the place. I thanked, rather, the prosperous family of the old- er decade which had bother- ed to build a house so well and had then been good enough to move away and leave it for just such strays as myself to lie snug in. I accepted without comment the general trimness of the place, the clear glaze of the panes, the bright sheen of the brasses. I would laugh a little at the methodical propriety of the holly and the greens that duly deco- rated the halls during the holiday season, and at the flannelette dogwood brought from the mothballs each spring, replenished always with new and authentic pussywillows. paying a month's rent in advance be- fore the truth of her ethics dawned en her hostess. The honest suitors of two college girls in the rear basement be- gan to talk. They would get glimpses of her in a brassière, as they passed through the hall, and it was not an experience to facilitate the honorable wooing the college girls demanded. The rent was paid, though, and the hussy refused to leave. Mrs. Kelsey was baffled, and her somewhat illogical strategy of turning off the young thing's lights proved to be just a laugh. I remember, though, that New York solved the problem in its own sure fashion, for after a week or so the girl abandoned her front basement for a penthouse on Park. Our tone was saved. A matter almost as much stressed as that of the noise was the appearance of the front windows. Curtains must harmonize, and any tenant who went -v<".,...""'____ -' -"'I ,,'<-<, ;.. . ..... ". :.:: ::::.::. '. :-:.:.... ? 'JJ f tt , , :".: >.:.....:::::..,:-. . ,A.,/r . ....:' (] , " >> . #.-:-"'" , "t<' ' . . Å.. ",<:t{ ,',:',: ' JÆ' . ,0"";<" ,..,,) . J ',--- "Psst, Marge. Quit shooting to her backhand-she'll ne"uer ask us out again." T HAT dogwood! I wondered suddenly if she had it here in Monaco. I thought not. I could im-